Welcome to the 5.10 patch notes - the one where supports get some lovin'. As we traverse the land in our diversity dirigible, we're still sussing out what impact the Cinderhulk changes had on the feasibility forest, so we've now turned our sights to sustain / utility-focused supports who have languished a bit in the diversity metrics. That said, rather than kicking all of the aggressive supports in the shins (except a small adjustment for Leona's E width to match the visuals), we realized we could probably introduce some new possibilities with utility mastery changes, sustain support item improvements, and some utility-focused buffs for champions more inclined to those ways.

Second thing - while we are still watching those Cinderhulk changes shake out, this doesn't mean we're going to be passive about the jungle in the meantime. We've seem some meaningful diversity improvements so far, but it's also clear that there were a few outlier champions who were just strong, so we're taking some additional action this patch (see: Gragas, Sejuani, Rek'Sai). Aside from some small follow-up for champions we adjusted in previous patches, that's the gist of 5.10!

P.S. Scarizard's out trying to find a better form of transportation than the diversity dirigible (frankly I think we've reached the pinnacle of design transportation here), so you get slightly less sass in the champion contexts. That's about it.

R - Shadow Dance

These are two changes aimed at two different things, so we'll explain. First, while we did intend for late-game Cass to be an unstoppable force of a half-snake, the scaling heal on Twin Fang makes her borderline unkillable for some team compositions (particularly given her zone control). Second, when we were looking for ways to trim power on Cass, we saw that her champion update came right before our big refactor of the mana regeneration stat of the 2015 season (with most champions ending up with less mana regen in general). Given that these original numbers were tuned around competing mid-laners of the time (and higher baseline mana regeneration expectations like Athene's Unholy Grail), we decided to modernize accordingly. Cassi's still going to hit like a truck in the lategame - we just wanted to give more windows of opportunity for opponents to take advantage.

E - Twin Fang

Following up on our Cinderhulk changes, we still think 'ol Graggy's taking up too much space in the jungle, so we're trimming some fat (not literally - that's gross) where we can. This might not be the change that gives jungle competitors some space to breathe, but at least letting his belly hitbox match the visuals is a good first step.

E - Body Slam

In terms of objective power shifts, this reduces some of Jinx's early game strength and trades it for a bit more lategame power. Philosophically we want to continue highlighting Jinx's late, late game potential, but we were also seeing her start to crush turrets early on once she got a snowball rolling. You might call a change like this a power curve Switcheroo! but then we'd have to hit you for trying too hard.

Spell hits and basic attacks on champions reduce Mantra's cooldown by a lot more at later levels. W has a higher AP ratio and can be used on monsters. E has a shorter cooldown, a lower mana cost, and shields for slightly less at later ranks. Instead of bonus damage, Mantra'd W now adds to the root duration and Mantra'd E now increases the base shield by a large amount and gives a greater area-of-effect shield.

Let's talk Karma.

Right now, while Karma does have a small - but dedicated - player base, she's someone we've put on our radar as an opportunity to improve. Specifically, while Karma does a number of things well (mid-range poke, movement-based team engagement, solo lane dueling), she hasn't really been stand-out in any category for some time and hasn't been able to scale well as the game progresses. Up front: these changes aren't going to "fix" everything (honestly no change does that!) - we just wanted to highlight more of Karma's unique strengths (utility and control) while also giving her that lategame scaling potential (a ramped up cooldown refund on Gathering Fire and much stronger utility potential in R-W / R-E). While these changes do reduce some of Karma's dueling threat, it's important to note that we're not trying to commit her to a duo-support lane or a solo lane specifically - just that we're trying giving her access to an end game fantasy (there's a word we haven't heard in a while) and feel we can do it through her more distinctive powers. Quick note on removing the damage on Mantra'd W / E - a goal here was to differentiate Karma's contextual decision making when selecting an ability to Mantra (super root? mega shield?), so we went down that path. Additionally, removing damage on R-E means we can up the ante on Gathering Fire's cooldown reduction without seeing Karma throw out a Mantra'd E every 6 seconds in clumpy team fights.

Skinny Zenith Blade. Leona's actually been climbing the power rankings for a little while, so we're applying a light touch here. Zenith Blade's actually got a super wide hitbox that nobody notices (it was close to Sona's Crescendo width!), so we're just matching up those visuals.

General

Rek'Sai's one of those gals who's been very strong for some time, and it's something we couldn't help but notice when she stayed viable and competitive through two large shifts in the jungle item metagame (Warrior and Cinderhulk). That said, we don't just want to kick her out of the feasibility forest (the diversity dirigible flies over it), so we're going for a light change to reduce the reliability of her level 3 ganks.

R - Desperate Power

Heads up: Due to a behind-the-scenes mistake, we only changed Sejuani's tooltip and not her actual in-game damage. In other words, no functional power change has been made but her tooltip will read otherwise. We're going to get this change into the next hotfix or the next patch. Sorry!

For a tanky, crowd-control focused armor lady, Sejuani's dealing a whole boar-load of damage (sorry) in addition to her super disruptive glacial powers. Reducing some of that damage lets us focus Sej on what she does best - being a tanky, crowd-control focused armor lady (we just said that).

R - Unstoppable Onslaught

We wanted to give this fabulous Gem Knight a little love and realized that the mana cost of Imbue was pretty outrageously high. So we reduced it.

Q - Imbue

COST60/80/100/120/140 mana⇒60/70/80/90/100 mana

Items

Shop Performance

We actually shipped this behind-the-scenes performance upgrade in 5.9, but weren't sure if it would 'stick' or if it solved everything in the first place. Now that it's had a patch to bake, we think it's... doing well? Let us know if you run into issues with the shop freezing.

NO LONGER AN ICE CREAM STOREWe've added some performance upgrades to the shop to (hopefully) solve most issues with freezing - let us know if they helped!

Ancient Coin Line

Short story: Ancient Coin's in a pretty rough spot. Not only does it give less combat stats and less gold than its gold generating brethren (aka you give up a lot of lane presence and don't get much in return), but Righteous Glory has also gone and stolen Talisman's premier "push a button and run at them fast" item identity. We're not going to take away Righteous Glory's hard-earned... glory, but we're just bringing some parity to the playground while also giving some more "run at your fast" potential with that lower active cooldown.

Talisman of Ascension

Ardent Censer now gives slightly less attack speed but now grants +30 bonus magic damage on hit to the buffed target. Also doesn't work on creeps anymore. Sorry Alistar.

The real important thing here is the crit text. It looks all floaty and satisfying for people who like to buff other people.

Anyway.

When Ardent Censer was first released it had a lot of potential for shield / heal-based champions but they often found themselves trying to decide what to give up for what was effectively an attack speed buffing item. On reconsideration, we think this item could be a pretty sparkly pickup if it just had a wider range of applications. Now it's like a mini Help, Pix! that can scale off your allies' attack speed!

We get a decent amount of 'bug reports' for Blade of the Ruined King, but they're mostly related to the fact that the active range of BotRK is slightly out of sync (that is, shorter) than basic ranged autoattack ranges. This item actually used to have a 550 range, but it was pretty terrifying on melee champions. That said, since we've reduced the active damage portion of this item, we think we can bring that range sync back.

Intelligence

Wanderer

WANDERERERGrants+5% movement speed⇒+20 movement speed (that's from a percentage to a flat amount)

Summoner's Rift

Super Minions

A few patches back we made a functionally non-impacting change to Super Minions. Short summary: they used to give themselves their own armor / resistance / damage aura. We thought that was a little janky so we just gave them higher base stats and didn't allow for the self-aura application.

The previously described change is completely unrelated to the reasoning behind this change - we just wanted to highlight it so the below numbers make sense. Here we've just realized that magic damage dealers don't have enough sustained damage to deal with these tanky brutes, so we're reducing a bit of that MR.

General

MAGIC RESISTANCE40⇒-30

Monster Leashing

We're cleaning up a few exploit cases where solo ranged attackers are resetting monster aggro to clear camps without taking damage. Be careful with those leashes!

NEWRANGED RESET SHENANIGANSWhen a monster loses aggro due to range, its leash counter increases by 1 (the same as if that monster had targeted a different champion). If the monster re-acquires a ranged target after being hit, it will also increase its leash counter by 1 (the same as if that monster had re-acquired its original target). This basically means that ranged attackers can now only solo-reset a monster camp 3 times, down from 6.

LEASH RANGE750⇒700

MAXIMUM RESETS5⇒6

Visual Adjustments

Some people were asking for more critters; others were asking for them to go away. Let's...do both.

SUGAR FREEAdded a "Hide eye candy" toggle in the Game tab of the Options menu. Disabling this option will hide visual flair such as persistent critters (the ones that hang around after 1:55), water ripples and other moving elements which aren't relevant to gameplay.

SWEET STUFFAdded a few more critters to Summoner's Rift!

On a side note, we've been making a bunch of small touch-ups to the map over the past couple of months (as promised when we launched the updated Rift). We prefer to avoid overhyping these updates patch-by-patch, but we'll at least take this opportunity to confirm that you're not going crazy: Baron pit did not always have purple disco runes.

Howling Abyss

We like a good snowball fight, but things were getting a little ridiculous. Our primary goal was to give bruiser/tanky types the balls (snowballs, man) they needed to get into the fight, but when you see Ashe running Mark/Dash trying to snipe off a squishy backliner, something's probably up.

COOLDOWN20 seconds⇒40 seconds

DAMAGE SPLITDamage is split between Mark and Dash by33.3%/66.%⇒50%/50%

HOLY THAT WAS A LONG RANGE2500⇒1600

Ranked Inactivity Notifications

Ranked decay is an extremely impactful component of the Leagues system, but one that didn't make a lot of noise as it was about to kick in. Previously, you'd only get a one-time notification as you approached the decay threshold. We're dialing up the frequency of inactivity warnings to ensure that the risk of decay stays front-of-mind, hopefully cutting out cases where players simply forget to maintain their ranking.

Some clarification for below: we haven't changed our inactivity thresholds, this is just a good opportunity to resurface them.

LIKE A SNOOZE BUTTONPlayers in danger of ranked decay will receive an inactivity warning notificationjust once⇒every time they log in until becoming active again

MASTER & CHALLENGER SOLODecay starts after 10 days of inactivity, with warnings during the final 3 days

MASTER & CHALLENGER TEAMDecay starts after 28 days of inactivity, with warnings during the final 9 days

PLAT & DIAMONDDecay starts after 28 days of inactivity, with warnings during the final 9 days(both solo and team queues)

Sandstorm Ekko

As usual, we'll have a full coverage post on Ekko once he is released! In the mean time, check out the 5.10 PBE coverage for a better look.

Upcoming Champion Skins

Patch 5.10 is set to include a total of THREE new champion skins - Order of the Lotus Irelia, Nightmare Tryndamere, and Knockout Lee Sin. As usual, no release dates for any of these but we'll have complete preview posts ready when they launch!